


Ladies, Who Lunch

by Enk



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fanart, Friendship, Gen, Infinity Gems, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 07:37:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4868612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enk/pseuds/Enk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In an alternate universe, unbeknownst to the rest of the worlds, the Infinity Stones have bound to the most courageous women on Earth to preserve the order of everything. Those who seek the Stones continue to search, but none suspect ladies, who lunch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ladies, Who Lunch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kyburg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyburg/gifts).



> For kyburg who wanted ladies who lunch with Jane, Pepper, Natasha, and Karen Page

[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/enkanowen/644546/53005/53005_original.png)

 

 

The others are already there when Jane arrives, ten minutes late, in yesterday's clothes- but freshly showered thank you- with a stack of binders balancing a tablet on top. She looks forward to lunch with Pepper, Karen, and Natasha. Her branch of Physics is still full of testosterone, and oh she should remember that she has a STEM talk and workshop with Girl Scouts of America next week. And a new umbrella, she definitely needs a new umbrella, it's pouring and of course she only now remembers she left it on the the train and it's probably halfway to Slough.

 

"Hi," she scrambles for a moment but Natasha catches the falling tablet and Karen takes the stack of papers from her so she can sit down without any further disaster, "sorry I'm late, but the lab went crazy last night. Did you get my e-mail?"

 

Ladies who lunch hasn't always been a thing. Of course, Jane had been friendly with Pepper for a few years now. They'd been working together on a few things, more so now that Tony Stark is retired from running Stark Industries and focusing exclusively on R&D. It had been great. The funding had been even better and Jane had spent a lot of time working on the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, which had been a dead end until the Convergence and the Aether. Jane had been the first to know what it felt like to be fused to an infinity stone and the knowledge was immense. So immense that a stable human-built wormhole was only as far off as it would take Stark Industries to build the hardware.

 

"It's fine," Pepper smiles, "take a breath, let's have some tea."

 

"Thanks for coming to London." Jane returns the smile. "It's been hard to get away."

 

"Plus someone has a really hot boyfriend." Karen grins and pours Jane a cup.

 

"Well," Jane knows she does. Everyone else also knows. What they don't know is how kind, loving, funny, and-

 

"Hey no boys allowed during lunch," Natasha leans back comfortably in her chair. She always looks so different in civilian clothing. There's definitely a difference between how undercover spy Natasha dresses and how Nat dresses when she's out with her friends. Her hair is growing out, her dress is for her and no one else. Sure she could have been in super-sexy spy mode, but she's in flats not heels. That's her tell. She picks up the tablet. "May I?"

 

Jane nods. There is a reason they lunch, a reason they all got to know each other so well. After the battle against Malekith in London, the Aether had been sent away or so Jane thought. She had thrown herself back into work to get through the feeling of having such power and knowledge and then having that power and knowledge ripped away. It had been for the best of course, being alive and all that, but after having felt the Aether, there always had been a longing, a call to somewhere in the universe, but where she did not quite know at the time. With what she had learned, and with a little nudge from some Asgardian technology, she had managed to not only figure out the solid Mathematics behind a stable wormhole, she may or may not have also built a tiny wormhole and pointed it at the coordinates in the universe that felt the most... right.

 

The wormhole had been microscopic. Jane hadn't expected anything other than confirmation that it had a beginning, and end, was temporarily stable, and pointing at the place where she wanted it to point. She hadn't expected to wake up across the lab two days later with a headache worse than that tequila hangover her and Darcy had after Thor had disappeared the first time. And then, she had realized, her mind wasn't just her own any more. The months after that had been rough when she had found herself unwilling to trust Thor enough to tell him or any of the Avengers. She hadn't even told Darcy.

 

Jane was the first and then, after the Tony Stark and Bruce Banner created Ultron and nearly destroyed the Earth, Pepper became the second. In an explosion of incredible magnitude when Ultron had attempted to create artificial life that was more than him, the stone from inside Loki's sceptre had vanished. Or so they all thought. She still remembers the frantic call from Pepper and then the peace they both felt knowing they could trust each other, knowing there must be a greater plan and they were part of it.

 

"So this is the detector Stark wants to you to build to find the stones?" Natasha looks over the specs.

 

"Tony has been adamant that we put as many resources into retrieving the stones as possible in order to find them before Thanos does and ends the world." Pepper takes a polite sip swallowing down any snide remark that would have come from her otherwise.

 

"And when she says many, we're talking serious zeroes. I'm waiting to come back to a carte blanche."

 

"Not gonna happen, not while I'm CEO," Pepper takes another sip, "my life is dedicated to not run bankrupt on another one of Tony's pipe dreams."

 

"Sorry, just to clarify," Karen is looking through some of the binders, "is this because it won't work because you're sabotaging his idea or because it won't work because you don't think it will."

 

"The former. They can't know." Natasha was the third to encounter a stone. It had happened on a mission. In an attempt to infiltrate a compound through a cave system, an earthquake had brought down half the mountain. It took all of Stark's suits with the help of the rest of the Avengers a week to find her beneath the rubble and miraculously alive. And a little bit more. Natasha didn't initially notice anything different. She'd assumed between statistical probability and sheer dumb luck, she'd made it somehow. It wasn't until Pepper had constantly felt drawn to her, and the other way around. Even Jane had found more excuses to fly back to the states when she knew Natasha would be in Stark Tower.

 

That's when they figured out that the stones want to be together. It must be their natural state. They don't know enough yet to say for sure, but once the three of them had met and been together, it was hard to be apart. Very hard. |Once, they'd been apart for close to three months which had nearly rendered them incapable of functioning like normal human beings. Natasha would be filled with uncontrollable rage; Pepper would be lost inside her own little world to the point of sitting catatonic on her bed for days; and Jane would hallucinate the end of the world over and over. Being together all the time would raise suspicion, but with careful testing, they figured out that bi-weekly lunches would allow them to live their lives while still keeping the stones inside them from rebelling. Jane still hadn't quite come to a conclusion as to why that was, but perhaps soon there would be answers. For a long time, almost a year, there had been no one else new. They were living their lives, becoming very close friends and that was good.

 

"Okay, but this says that whatever Jane has built," Karen looks at Jane, not with mistrust but with surprise, "it works."

 

"What do you mean it works? I made sure those calculations would be off by more than the margin of error to ensure complete sabo-ta- it works."

 

Karen became the fourth on a lazy Sunday morning. That had taken them all by surprise since none of them had personally known Karen before the stone inside the Tesseract had found her. Pepper had seen her name in the news but nothing more. Unlike the rest of them, there had been no catastrophic intervention, no violent experience. She'd merely woken up with a headache one day. A headache that lasted two weeks, several doctors' visits, and a slow descent into what Karen had thought to be stress-related mental illness. When she spoke to Matt and Foggy about and they supported her decision to take a few weeks off to get rest and seek professional help. The day after she'd brushed her teeth in her bathroom one moment and then found herself in Natasha's car the next.

 

And that's when Ladies' Lunch was born. No one suspects women having fancy lunches together to be bearers of the most powerful objects in the universe. Everyone has their eyes on the Avengers who raced across the universe to find them. Building the detector was supposed to be a distraction, because while they needed to be a secret, no one else should have to die looking for them. Steve had been as easy to convince to change the Avengers' strategy as Tony had been. Jane still thinks it's because that gives Steve more time to look for Bucky. At any rate, it meant that there was less venturing out in the universe and more focusing on remotely finding the stones. And that was something they could control as long as Jane was involved in the process. Until now that had worked.

 

“There's another stone on Earth?” Natasha mused as she drank her coffee. “Does that mean-”

 

“Pardon me, Miss.” Their waiter arrives with food.

 

“Oh, was I that late? I'm so sorry, but I'm glad you ordered...,” she trails off when Pepper gives her a look, “...without me.”

 

“Do not worry,” the waiter places a plate of what looks to be salmon in front of Jane, “your friends did not forget you.”

 

“I thought we're supposed to keep things reigned in,” Karen whispers once the waiter leaves again, “I mean yes, I do love shepherd's pie, but if I'd known I wouldn't have spent six hours on a place with a crying baby.”

 

“I didn't mean to.” Pepper whispers back. “It just happens sometimes.”

 

“You know if Stark continues to insist on the-”

 

“No,” she doesn't let Natasha finish. “We're not going to control anyone's mind to get what we want.”

 

“At least not using superpowers.” Jane has a bite of the salmon. It's divine.

 

“We should talk about this,” Karen puts the binder in Jane's bag under the table, “later, somewhere else.”

 

They nod in agreement and eat in comfortable silence for a while. At least until Darcy bursts through the door of the restaurant, dripping wet, completely out of breath, and dragging a carry-on behind her.

 

“I'm-”, she bends over to catch her breath, “I'm supposed to be in New Zealand on my honeymoon. Why the hell did I switch planes in Vancouver and came here?”

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                      _fin._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bonus unknown stone, Darcy

[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/enkanowen/644546/52902/52902_original.png)

 


End file.
